Interference

Below is a sneak peek of this content!

The first time I saw it, I was absolutely sure that Country Joe West blew the call. I mean, that's par for the course, right? The second time I saw, the third time, the fourth time, really the first dozen times I saw it, from every angle, I was convinced...

Hello. You're probably seeing this boring paragraph because you haven't signed up yet to become a member. You can sign up here. We have a lot of fun here -- we're counting down the 100 best major league players of all time, writing a lot about baseball and dieting and family and music and other sports and geek tech and infomercials and, you know, whatever comes to mind. Would love to have you join us. There's also a chance that you're reading this because you can't sign in -- if that's the case, please click here and you can go to "posts" and see all the stories and stuff directly on the Patreon membership site.

The last picture … I still think you’re judging this from the wrong angle, thus there is some parallax error.

Unless there is a screen shot / video with the wall approximately perpendicular to the 2D-plane of the screen shot / video, it will be difficult to discern where contact is made with respect to the wall.

If these are the best images available, then I don’t think you can call interference given the uncertainty that still exists.

This is one of those rare instances where there is a blameless controversy. Unless you are blinded by the tribalism of fanhood, most people would probably agree that this is a very close call and that reasonable minds may differ on the outcome. So you can’t blame Joe West (for once), which makes this different from the Denkenger call, where he was clearly wrong. Replay was inconclusive, so you can’t blame the controversy there. In a vacuum, fans of both teams would probably prefer for the play to have been played out without the fans in the front row to see if Betts would have made the play; fans of neither team would prefer that, too, because either we were robbed of an amazing Betts defensive play, or an amazing, game-tying home run. But you can’t credibly blame the fans in the front row, either. They were doing what comes naturally to them and, to their credit, they didn’t egregiously reach over the wall (Jeffrey Maier-style), if they reached over at all. It’s unfortunate all the way around and in the end it’s probably a coin flip on what the right outcome should be – as unsatisfying as that is for all involved.

You don’t have the rule exactly right at the end of your article. Yes, if a fan interferes with the player trying to catch a ball, it’s interference…..but….. it further clarifies it by saying that once a player reaches over the wall/fence/railing, that player does so at his own risk and there is no interference. Most of your article dealt with that point, but it kind of veered off at the end.

To me, it’s a slightly finer point. While Betts may have made contact with the fan slightly before his glove went over the wall, the ball was in the first row. There is no way at all that Betts was going to touch the ball or catch it in the field of play. He had to reach into the stands to catch it and he was in the process of doing exactly that. So is it “first contact” that matters? If so, your argument has merit. Oddly then, we’d be saying that an accidental first touch in the field of play is interference, but if the guy had waited a millisecond until Betts glove passed into the stands then intentionally ripped Betts glove off, that’s OK. I’m not yet fully satisfied that we really understand the ruling.

I’m a Red Sox fan and I really am not sure. I found the image that Joe landed on quite convincing, but when I went back and looked at the video, I think it’s an optical illusion. Gray shirt may have reached onto the field but it was blue shirt that actually made contact with the glove.

I don’t know what people are debating here. That last picture Joe has, showing the guy in the blue shirt leaning on the wall and reaching over it, and the guy in the white shirt also reaching way out, while Betts is still 2 feet from the wall, proves to me that it’s interference. It’s close, sure. But a fan knocked Betts’ glove closed, and the bottom picture shoes the fans leaning onto the field. I’m a little confused as to why people are so adamant it’s not interference.

Part of the issue is Joe West himself. Not necessarily his hair-trigger (an unhelpful trait for any official, really) or his sometimes odd calls – it’s that when that ball is hit he’s barely able to heave himself down the line more than ten, fifteen feet. Nobody’s saying he should be able to keep up with professional athletes, much less those who are awesome, but it’s reasonable to expect that an official is fit enough for his duties to get himself into proper position to make a call. From personal experience (playing and reffing VERY low-level hockey), I can tell you that it drives everyone crazy when the ref is out of position and also not working to get into position. The unanswerable objection is “How could you make that call from all the way over there?”

Even if Joe West was “wrong”, there is no good reason to blame him. I don’t see how any human being, even an experienced umpire, can, at a considerable distance, detect accurately whether the fan reached over the rail a couple of inches onto the field of play and whether he “interfered” with Betts’ attempted catch (which is largely subjective). If there is any blame, it should be assigned to the Houston fan who deliberately attempted to make the catch on his own even if he thought he was acting legally. He wound up contributing to the Astro’s loss. Why can’t he just respect the game of baseball and wait for the baseball to come to him. If he doesn’t get the ball. so what.

OK, I have looked and looked at the last two photos and something is just odd about them. Although all the principals from the front row are the same in the two photos, there are people in each photo who should be in the other photo that I cannot find. How is that possible? For instance, Mr. Light Blue Shirt on the far right of the 2nd to last photo should be right behind the action in the last photo, about 2 rows up. I don’t see him. And the guy in the last photo in the whitish golf shirt with his sunglasses clipped to his shirt, where is he in the prior photo?

I think people are being way too kind to the fans, both in the comments here and on fangraphs, for example. The general view is that you can’t blame the fans, who understandably want to catch the ball.

Well, you know what, I do blame the fans. They are the ones that caused this whole mess. Here they are, in the front row with the defender charging right at them, the ball perhaps barely clearing the fence. This is a playoff game. Any reasonable person would do one thing: get the heck out of the way! Let him try to make the play! You are a fan, you are not one of the players. You are not entitled to that ball until it is no longer being used in the game.

But no, they want to put that baseball on their mantle and show it to all their friends. It’s really comparable to Bartman. You wouldn’t think about it that way, because Bartman hurt his own team. But he did essentially the same thing, reaching right near the plane of the fence to grab a ball that was still playable. I contend that these guys were acting and thinking the same way. I don’t believe that they were trying to help Houston — they were just trying to get a ball. Who gives a damn about the game when you can take home a playoff ball and show it to your friends?

I think we can expect a whole lot more of the fans sitting right at the boundary. We’ve seen many times on foul popups where the fans respectfully let the player try to make the play. Then lean back, they give him room. And other times where they act like asses. They don’t have to be asses. Some just act that way. But that doesn’t mean we should excuse them and say “Oh, that’s understandable fan behavior.” No it’s not. It’s thoughtless jerk behavior. Reasonable people think “Oh damn, I better get out of the way!”

They robbed all of us. They robbed us of a great Sports Center moment, either a home run saving catch or a near miss. When they show the highlights of this fantastic game, with all the great outfield plays and clutch hits, we get to see Betts going back, back, back…and running into some idiots who thought their souvenir was more important than the ball game.

This couldn’t happen in other sports, because they don’t let the fans get that close. And what if they did? “Montana throws long to Rice, he’s at the back of the end zone, he reaches up to catch the ball and…oh, a fan knocked his hand away. We’ll have to see on the replay whether the fan’s hand broke the plane of the sideline. If the fan was on his side of the sideline, it’s only understandable that he’d want that football as a souvenir! So it’s not his fault.”

Fans have to get out of the way. They should be expected to get out of the way. They are not a physical part of the game. They can shout and try to distract the other team that way. But they owe it to all of us to let the players play.

So yes, I blame the idiots in the first row in right field. Not Joe West, who had to make the best call he could make in a tough situation. And did you all notice what the fans did on Thursday on a very similar ball? They stayed back. One guy had his hands to his chest like he was being held up. So this time we got to watch real baseball, and Betts made the nice catch.